About This Course

Get acquainted with the purpose and outcomes of this course.

Course goals#

This course won’t dive into a single tool or a single process used for DevOps; instead, we’ll help you become proficient in many different tools and processes.

We’ll discuss the following topics:

  • Which tool works the best for a given task?
  • What tools should we explore in more depth?
  • What tools are less useful?

Our goal is not to learn about every tool in detail but rather to explore many concepts and a plethora of tools, creating an overview of the tools and processes that are useful. The goal is to get you up to speed on what’s available while also producing beneficial real-world results.

Think of each chapter as a crash course on something with an outcome that can be used right away. We’ll offer our experiences with what seems to work well and choices that may have been right in the past, but might be less optimal choices now.

Who is this course for?#

This course is for software developers who want to expand their knowledge of deployment operations. You should have a beginner-level knowledge of basic DevOps principles and a desire to learn more about those concepts.

About the requirements#

The requirements will be listed near the beginning of each chapter. They vary from one subject to another, but each lesson requires a laptop, Git, and a Bash terminal to practice all the commands, which have been pretested for you.

Every chapter starts from scratch and ends with the destruction of everything we've created. That way, you should be able to go through every chapter independently from others. Each one is self sufficient. This should allow you to skip the parts you’re not interested in, or revisit others when you need to refresh your memory. An additional benefit of such destruction is that, if you chose to run things in the cloud, you won't waste money when not working on the exercises.

Words of advice from the author#

There will be some text to read, but most of the content consists of hands-on exercises. We believe that the best way to learn something is through practice, and this is a course full of real-world, hands-on examples. Each chapter will let you dive into a different tool or a process.

At the end of each chapter, you’ll be able to say, “Now I know what this is about, and now I can make a decision whether it’s a worthwhile investment.” Think of this course as a catalog combined with patterns and blueprints.

Let’s begin!

Introduction to Infrastructure As Code